It’s been a while, are you still there? I’m still here, which is pretty remarkable if you zoom out far enough. Scientists still don’t know how life first began on this planet, yet here I am. Here we all are. Hurtling through space. Feeling happy. Feeling sad. Eating. Worrying. Growing older. Wondering if we’re using the limited time we have well enough, hoping we won’t look back one day with regret. Or an excessive amount of regret, because life is inevitably full of regrets. Dealing with – accepting – these regrets, that’s the key. Or a key. Another key is to distract yourself from thinking about all this shit, but I’ve learned that I’m not terribly good at that. At least not lately. Even when I have boulder to push up the hill, I’m only able to really focus on that boulder for a few moments before returning to thoughts of my own mortality.

At the moment I don’t have a boulder, or a significant one, whether by choice or by circumstance, so I’ve been doing an unhealthy amount of ruminating. Which inevitably leads, at least for me, to a bout of depression. And depression is a tricky one. Because it festers. It begets itself. It becomes the boulder that won’t budge, but refuses to be ignored. And you know that all you need to do is push a little bit harder, but then you’ll just have to push again, so what’s the point?

This is my tenth year in New York City, and I’m starting to think it may be my last. This city is wonderful in many ways, but also horrible in many ways, and lately the latter seems to be outweighing the former. I can’t imagine growing old in this city, and I’m not sure how anyone does it without an enormous amount of money. At one point in my life I would have felt like leaving New York would be like giving up on my aspirations, and to a point I still feel that way, but the bar just keeps going up and up, and the subway keeps getting worse and worse. I used to say that every New Yorker has a love-hate relationship with this city, mine is starting to develop into more of a hate-hate relationship, and I really don’t have the heart for that much hate, so maybe it’s time to move on.

The good news is, my bout with the flu was short-lived, and was not (as the internet led me to believe) meningitis. Count your blessings, distrust the internet.